[datawander]

But if that is displayed as a line chart, that clearly displays the year-over-year differences. So if someone wants to ask "what is the overall trend of spending over the past five years?" that is nearly impossible with the pie chart.

Pie charts are by far one of the worst forms of graphs ever devised and should be killed off as a concept for good, as in, please remove this from Excel.

[dasil003]

Everyone is this thread is conveniently ignoring that the data is initially presented as a bar graph. The pie chart is secondary for a very narrow purpose, and it's far from terrible in this application.